Trump says he will cancel all Biden executive orders signed by autopen – as it happened

Further to that, US Citizenship and Immigration Services has halted all asylum decisions, the agency’s director, Joseph Edlow, has said.

“USCIS has halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” Edlow said on X.

The US state department has announced that it has “IMMEDIATELY paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports”.

In a post on X, the department said it was “taking all necessary steps to protect U.S. national security and public safety”.

It comes after the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced processing of immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals was indefinitely suspended pending further review.

A Ukrainian delegation is heading to the US for further discussions over a peace plan pushed by Donald Trump, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The Ukrainian group, including senior Ukrainian security official Rustem Umerov and first deputy foreign minister Sergiy Kyslytsya, is expected to meet with US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Florida, according to Bloomberg’s report.

It comes after Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff and closest ally, Andriy Yermak, who had been leading the latest round of the delicate peace negotiations with the US, abruptly resigned earlier today after Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies conducted searches at his apartment.

• Donald Trump announced his intention to nullify all executive orders “and anything else” signed by his predecessor Joe Biden using an autopen. Repeating his baseless claims that Biden had not signed off on all the orders himself, Trump said he would terminate “any document Signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen”. It is unclear whether Trump would actually be able to do this, given that US presidents are allowed to use autopens to sign key documents and have done so for decades, and that to date there hasn’t been any concrete evidence of any attempt to circumvent Biden’s will during his presidency.

• Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said that his department would work to cut off federal benefits to “illegal aliens” and restrict them to US citizens only. It comes after Trump said immigration from certain countries would be paused permanently in a social media post replete with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Bessent said that the president was “right – if you’re here illegally, there’s no place for you in our financial system. Illegal aliens that use our financial institutions to move their illicitly obtained funds is exploitation, and it will end.”

• Defense secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive to leave no survivors in the first US strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the Washington Post (paywall) reported, citing two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said. As two survivors clung to the smouldering wreck, the Special Operations commander overseeing the 2 September attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter told the Post. Per the Post’s report: “The two men were blown apart in the water.” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell declined to address the Post’s questions about Hegseth’s order and other details of the operation, including Special Operations involvement, saying: “This entire narrative is completely false.”

• The suspected national guard shooter will face upgraded charges from assault to murder in the first degree, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, announced this morning. The father of Sarah Beckstrom confirmed on Thursday that she had died. Guardsman Andrew Wolfe, 24, remained in critical condition and was “fighting for his life”, Trump said on Friday. Here is a rundown of everything we know so far about the suspect.

Further to his earlier post weighing in on the upcoming Honduran election, Donald Trump has said that he will grant a pardon to former Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US after his conviction on drug trafficking and firearms charges.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump reiterated his backing for Honduran presidential candidate Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party and said that “if he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money”.

Ed Whelan, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has posted some legal insight on X on whether or not Trump can nullify anything Biden signed using an autopen.

He writes: “Donald Trump is free to revoke all of Biden’s executive orders, whether or not Biden personally signed them. But he doesn’t have the same freedom with respect to ‘anything else’ (e.g., bills enacted by Congress, pardons) that Biden directed be signed by autopen.”

Whelan cites an opinion issued in 2005 by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel “that the president may ‘sign’ a bill (within the meaning of the governing constitutional provision) by directing a subordinate to affix the president’s signature to the bill, including by autopen.”

Representative James Comer, the Republican chair of the GOP-led House oversight committee, has welcomed Trump’s announcement on X:

I applaud President Trump for deeming President Biden’s autopen actions NULL AND VOID.

The House Oversight Committee recently exposed how the Biden Autopen Presidency is one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. As Americans witnessed President Biden’s decline with their own eyes, Biden’s inner circle sought to deceive the public, conceal his condition, and take unauthorized executive actions using the autopen—actions that are now invalid. The House Oversight Committee delivered crucial transparency, and now President Trump and his administration are delivering accountability.

The committee released a report in October on Biden’s use of the autopen that made many sweeping claims but did not include any concrete evidence that aides conspired to enact policies without Biden’s knowledge or that he was unaware of laws, pardons or executive orders signed in his name.

The report alleged, without evidence, a “cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline” orchestrated by Biden’s inner circle. It pushed contested claims that the president’s mental state had declined to such an extent that White House officials were able to enact policies without his knowledge, and focused heavily on the pardons he granted in office, many of which infuriated Donald Trump.

“Barring evidence of executive actions taken during the Biden presidency showing that President Biden indeed took a particular executive action, the committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void,” the report said.

Democrats on the committee denounced the report as a “sham”, highlighting that the report included no evidence to support the allegations made. Legal experts have also warned that attempts to void past executive actions could set a problematic precedent, given that so many other presidents have utilized the autopen.

There are many questions around whether Joe Biden’s pardons and executive orders could be nullified, given that US presidents are allowed to use the autopen – and have done so for decades – and that there has been no concrete evidence of any attempt to bypass Biden’s will at any time.

In March this year, Mike Howell, the executive director of the aforementioned Oversight Project, which has investigated the signatures on dozens of official documents signed by Biden, told the New York Times (paywall) that the only feasible way to test that question was in the courts. That would require the justice department charging someone who had received a pardon from Biden with a crime.

“It’s a rocket ship to the Supreme Court if that happens,” Howell told the NYT. “We’re loading up the cannon for all sorts of things.”

The X account for the Oversight Project, a branch of the conservative Heritage Foundation started in 2022 with a mission of “increasing aggressive oversight of the Biden administration”, has posted this in response to Trump’s announcement:

Thank you President Trump for taking our historic Autopen investigation and findings seriously and ordering your Administration to take action.

We will follow up with the relevant authorities to identify what fraudulent documents are still being treated with legal effect.

A college freshman trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving was instead deported to Honduras in violation of a court order, according to her attorney.

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19, had already passed through security at Boston Logan international airport on 20 November when she was told there was an issue with her boarding pass, said attorney Todd Pomerleau. The Babson College student was then detained by immigration officials and within two days sent to Texas and then Honduras, the country she left at age seven.

“She’s absolutely heartbroken,” Pomerleau told the Associated Press. “Her college dream has just been shattered.”

According to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an immigration judge ordered Lopez Belloza deported in 2015. Pomerleau said she wasn’t aware of any removal order, however, and the only record he has found indicates her case was closed in 2017.

“They’re holding her responsible for something they claim happened a decade ago that she’s completely unaware of and not showing any of the proof,” the lawyer said.

The day after Lopez Belloza was arrested, a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting the government from moving her out of Massachusetts or the US for at least 72 hours. ICE did not respond to an email on Friday from the Associated Press seeking comment about violating that order. Babson College also did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Lopez Belloza, who is staying with her grandparents in Honduras, told the Boston Globe she had been looking forward to telling her parents and younger sisters about her first semester studying business.

“That was my dream,” she said. “I’m losing everything.”

Donald Trump has said that he is cancelling all executive orders signed by his predecessor Joe Biden using an autopen.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote: “Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect.”

He goes on to claim that “the Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden … took the Presidency away from him” and suggests without evidence that other individuals had signed documents on Biden’s behalf using an autopen.

I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally.

Trump has frequently belittled his predecessor and repeatedly alleged that Biden was addled by the end of his term in office and not really the one making decisions.

Without evidence, he has claimed many times that Biden administration officials may have forged their boss’s signature by using the autopen and taken broad actions he was not aware of.

Trump has also obsessively cast doubt on the validity of pardons and other documents that Biden signed with an autopen, even though for decades other presidents before him have also relied on the device to sign key papers. Trump himself has also used an autopen in the past.

Donald Trump spoke with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro last week and discussed a possible meeting between them in the United States, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing multiple people with knowledge.

The New York Times added that there were no plans at the moment for such a meeting.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, was said to be on the call – which reportedly took place before the state department designated Maduro as the leader of the Cartel del los Soles, which the Trump administration considers a foreign terrorist organization.

In video footage from last Saturday Trump may have alluded to the phone call. Reporters asked the president about Jair Bolsonaro – the former president of Brazil now jailed for a coup attempt. Trump seems to suggest he spoke to Bolsonaro and expects to meet him in “the very near future” before looking surprised to hear of Bolsonaro’s arrest. As the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips wrote on X, the footage raises the question whether Trump was in fact talking of Maduro instead.

The treasury secretary Scott Bessent said on Friday that his department would work to cut off federal benefits to “illegal aliens” and restrict them to US citizens only.

Bessent’s announcement came after Donald Trump said immigration from certain countries would be paused permanently in a social media post replete with anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Writing on X on Friday, Bessent said: “At @POTUS @realDonaldTrump‘s direction, we are working to cut off federal benefits to illegal aliens and preserve them for U.S. citizens.

“@USTreasury announced that it will issue proposed regulations clarifying that the refunded portions of certain individual income tax benefits are no longer available to illegal and other non-qualified aliens, covering the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Additional Child Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Saver’s Match Credit.”

Bessent went on to say that Trump was “right – if you’re here illegally, there’s no place for you in our financial system. Illegal aliens that use our financial institutions to move their illicitly obtained funds is exploitation, and it will end.”

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the shooting of two national guards in Washington DC, faces murder charges after one of the troops died of her injuries.

The Associated Press has more on what we know of the suspect so far:

• Lakanwal, 29, entered the US in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden administration program that evacuated and resettled tens of thousands of Afghans after the US withdrawal from the country.

• He applied for asylum during the Biden administration, but his asylum was approved under the Trump administration, #AfghanEvac said in a statement.

• Lakanwal has been living in Bellingham, Washington, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of Seattle, with his wife and five children, said his former landlord, Kristina Widman.

• Lakanwal had briefly worked as an independent contractor for Amazon Flex, which allows people to use their own cars to deliver packages, a company spokesperson told the Associated Press. Lakanwal delivered packages from the end of July to the end of August and hadn’t been active since.

• Mohammad Sherzad, a neighbor of Lakanwal’s in Bellingham, told the AP that Lakanwal was polite, quiet and spoke very little English. Sherzad said he attended the same mosque as Lakanwal and had heard from other members that Lakanwal was struggling to find work. Some of his children attended the same school as Lakanwal’s children, Sherzad said.

• People who knew Lakanwal say he served in a CIA-backed Afghan Army unit before immigrating to the United States. Lakanwal worked in one of the special Zero Units in the southern province of Kandahar, according to a man who said he was Lakanwal’s cousin. The cousin said Lakanwal started working as a security guard for the unit in 2012 and was later promoted to become a team leader and a GPS specialist. A former official from the unit, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Lakanwal’s brother was a platoon leader.

• Zero Units were paramilitary units manned by Afghans but backed by the CIA that also served in front-line fighting with CIA paramilitary officers. Activists had attributed abuses to the units. They played a key role in the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country, providing security around Kabul International Airport as the Americans and withdrew from the country.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive to leave no survivors in the first US strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the Washington Post (paywall) reports, citing two people with direct knowledge of the operation.

“The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

As two survivors clung to the smouldering wreck, the Special Operations commander overseeing the 2 September attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter told the Post. Per the Post’s report: “The two men were blown apart in the water.”

The Intercept first reported that the survivors were killed in a follow-up attack.

The Pentagon’s lethal campaign on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific has killed more than 80 people in at least 23 strikes to date. The United Nations and other humanitarian organisations have described the attacks as extrajudicial executions.

A reminder that the US has failed to provide any evidence that the targeted vessels were actually carrying drugs, and legal experts say that even if they were, they did not pose an immediate threat.

Per the Post: “In briefing materials provided to the White House, JSOC reported that the “double-tap,” or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard to other vessels — not to kill survivors, according to another person who saw the report.

“In subsequent strikes on alleged traffickers that left no survivors, the US military has also fired multiple missiles to remove boats from the waterways, several people familiar with the matter said.”

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell declined to address the Washington Post’s questions about Hegseth’s order and other details of the operation, including Special Operations involvement.

“This entire narrative is completely false,” he said in a statement. “Ongoing operations to dismantle narcoterrorism and to protect the Homeland from deadly drugs have been a resounding success.”

Donald Trump weighed in on Honduras’ tightly contested presidential race again this morning, backing Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party, saying he can work with Asfura to counter drug trafficking.

“I hope the people of Honduras vote for Freedom and Democracy, and elect Tito Asfura, President!” Trump said on Truth Social.

Hondurans go to the polls on Sunday to vote in an election that remains a toss-up, with polls showing Asfura virtually tied with former defense minister Rixi Moncada, of the ruling leftist LIBRE Party, and television host Salvador Nasralla of the centrist Liberal Party.

In his post, Trump claimed Moncada was a communist while alleging that Nasralla is a “borderline communist” running to take votes away from Asfura. Neither candidate identifies as a communist.

“Will [Venezuelan president Nicolás] Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?” Trump asked in his post, saying that Asfura would fight against Maduro.

The Trump administration has accused the Venezuelan leader of links to drug trafficking and criminal groups, which Maduro denies.

Asfura’s party forged a close partnership with Washington under former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who governed from 2014 to 2022. Hernandez was arrested shortly after leaving office and is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US after his conviction on drug trafficking and firearms charges.

The Organization of American States and the US state department have both raised concerns about Honduras’ electoral process and said they are monitoring it closely.

Donald Trump has said that South Africa won’t be invited to next year’s G20 summit in Miami, extending a diplomatic row between the countries after the US boycotted the summit in Johannesburg last weekend.

In a post on Truth Social this morning, Trump repeated his widely discredited claims of a “genocide” against white Afrikaners in the country. “They are killing white people, and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them,” he wrote.

“At the conclusion of the G20, South Africa refused to hand off the G20 Presidency to a Senior Representative from our U.S. Embassy, who attended the Closing Ceremony. Therefore, at my direction, South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20, which will be hosted in the Great City of Miami, Florida next year,” Trump went on.

“South Africa has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of Membership anywhere, and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately.”

South Africa called the move “punitive” and “regrettable”. The presidency said in a statement: “It is regrettable that despite the efforts and numerous attempts by President Ramaphosa and his administration to reset the diplomatic relationship with the US, President Trump continues to apply punitive measures against South Africa based on misinformation and distortions about our country.”

Trump had already said in February that he was stopping aid to South Africa, accusing the government of discriminating against white minority Afrikaners, who ruled the country during apartheid and remain on average many times wealthier than black South Africans, including inciting violence against white farmers and confiscating their land.

South Africa’s government and many of its citizens have repeatedly pushed back against these claims, noting that land expropriation is only allowed under limited circumstances and that South Africa’s high crime rate affects everyone in the country.

The Trump administration in May began offering white South Africans refugee status in the US, while stopping all other refugee arrivals.

My colleague Rachel Savage has more on this story:

Hacked materials from the powerful rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation show that applicants to a Project 2025-branded effort to create a talent pool for the Trump administration cited the influence of Nazi political theorists and other far-right thinkers on their political views.

Not all applicants revealed in the hack ended up with Trump administration jobs, but some current appointees did make applications.

And amid a developing “civil war” on the right about the influence of the antisemitic far right – which has included internal dissension at Heritage – the materials show that at least seven members of a nationwide network of men-only, nativist and antisemitic clubs applied to work in the administration, revealing the extent to which the Republicans and the far-right have converged.

A reminder that Project 2025 was a policy project by Heritage designed to influence and power the agenda of the second Trump administration along radical conservative lines.

Here’s the full story:

West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito on Thursday defended the deployment of National Guard troops from her state to Washington, DC.

Capito, a Republican, told Fox News that crime in the city had declined and questioned whether Democratic lawmakers criticizing former President Donald Trump’s decision to send troops to Washington had spoken with Guard members on the ground.

The two Guard members shot on Wednesday had been assigned to duty in Washington since August, the West Virginia National Guard said in a statement.

West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey deployed the troops at Trump’s request.